What’s on your summer reading list? A dash of fiction, a dab of history? How about a book from NAS?
Take a copy of Beach Books with you to the beach. Dreaming of Europe? Try The Disappearing Continent. Interested in international affairs? Check out Outsourced to China.
We’re offering a special one-week sale: 40 percent off any print copy of an NAS report or executive summary! Bonus: Grab a copy of one of Peter Wood’s books at a steep discount, too.
Browse our sale items below, or check out all our offerings at Amazon.com.
Sale prices last one week, until July 5th.
Note: Due to Amazon’s policies for third-party sellers such as NAS, we may be required to charge shipping on each item in a multiple-item order—even if we ship all items together. If you order multiple books and reports, we will refund the additional shipping charges.
Books by NAS President Peter Wood
Diversity: The Invention of a Concept ($6.64)
Peter Wood traces the birth and evolution of the progressive concept of diversity, and details how its reductionist categories of race and gender came to define what it means to be human in politics, law, education, business, entertainment, personal aspiration, religion, and the arts.
A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today ($5.50)
America has gotten into ugly moods before, but never as today, when Americans increasingly take pride in being angry. In taking us on a guided tour of American acrimony, Peter Wood traces the roots of anger's triumph in our social and political world. He examines the liberating bromides of psychotherapists, the bellicosity of the war between the sexes, the broadsides of the ethnic separatists, and the jeremiads of fundamentalists of all stripes.
Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core is Bad for America ($9.00)
For the first time in history Americans face the prospect of a unified set of national curriculum standards for K-12 education. This book, featuring analysis from the leading scholars in the field, and edited and introduced by Peter Wood, examines the Common Core’s deleterious effects on language arts, mathematics, and history. Drilling through the Core also analyzes the Common Core’s questionable legality, its roots in the aggressive spending of a few wealthy donors, its often-underestimated costs, and the untold damage it will wreak on American higher education.
Reports from NAS
Beach Books 2016–2017: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? (Full Report: $12.00, Executive Summary: $3.00)
Hundreds of American colleges and universities assign a summer reading to entering freshmen—usually one book, which is often un-academic and politically progressive. Find out what book your alma mater chose—and peruse NAS’s list of 110 recommended books. You might find a new book to add to your own summer reading list.
For comparison, check out Beach Books: 2014-2016 and the Beach Books: 2014-2016 Executive Summary—both at an even steeper discount of 60% off.
Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education ($12.00)
Since 2004, the Chinese government has planted Confucius Institutes that offer Chinese language and culture courses at colleges and universities around the world—including more than 100 in the United States. Find out what kinds of constraints China places on American host universities. If you’re following international relations, this report offers insight into China’s long-term cultural outreach.
Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics (Full Report: SOLD OUT, Executive Summary: $3.00)
A new movement in American higher education aims to transform the teaching of civics into progressive political activism. The “New Civics” prefers global citizenship to national citizenship and advocacy to scholarship.
Full report > (SOLD OUT)
The Disappearing Continent: A Critique of the Revised AP European History Examination ($4.80)
The 2015 AP European History exam warps and guts the history of Europe. APEH offers the history of government, not the history of liberty. It diminishes Christianity, omits Columbus, and reduces Churchill to a single prompt. Parents should read to find out what holes to fill in their children’s education—and professors should recognize what historical knowledge their incoming students will lack.
The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom ($4.80)
Campus protests and the anemic responses to them by campus officials have put a spotlight on our nation’s division over the definitions of intellectual and academic freedom. What does intellectual freedom mean, when even radical activists claim its mantle to justify their behavior? In this thirty-page booklet, NAS President Peter Wood lays out a thoughtful restatement of principles.
Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels (Full Report: $12.00, Executive Summary: $3.00)
The fossil fuel divestment movement attacks freedom of inquiry and responsible social advocacy by turning college endowments into billboards for political virtue signaling. Why do college students demand that endowments sell off investments in coal, oil, and gas companies as a matter of moral obligation? This report offers the most exhaustive encyclopedia and analysis of the movement to date.
Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism ($19.95)
To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.
Alas, this report is not part of our sale. We ran out of copies of the first edition and now rely on a publisher, Polaris Press, which brought out the second edition last year. Get your copy from Polaris Press via Amazon here. For a complimentary 16-page executive summary, please write to us at [email protected].
What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students (Executive Summary and Interpretive Preface: $4.80)
NAS’s Bowdoin report is a landmark in higher education reform: the first 360-degree snapshot of campus life and the curriculum at an elite liberal arts college. What Does Bowdoin Teach? details the history and decline of Bowdoin from a college with strong intellectual traditions, a core curriculum, and a commitment to Western Civilization to a college with a new focus on race, class, gender, and the environment.
The full report, nearly 400 pages, is not in print and can be read online. A shorter interpretive preface offers the main findings.
Executive summary and interpretive preface >
A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California ($4.80)
This report documents the corruption of the University of California by activist politics, which sharply lowered the quality of academic teaching, analysis, and research. The report explains the reasons why the university should never be used for political purposes, and rebuts common defenses of the current politicized state of the university.
The Scandal of Social Work Education ($4.80)
Social work education provides a case study of a field with an especially advanced case of politicization, in which dogma, tendentiousness, and coerced intellectual conformity are integral to the definition of the field. This report documents that trend.
See the complete NAS store online here. The sale lasts just one week, through July 5th!
Image: Dion J. Pierre
